A Study on Solving Independent Set Reconfiguration Problem with Answer Set Programming

Abstract

Independent Set Reconfiguration Problem (ISRP) is defined as determining, for a given independent set problem instance and two feasible solutions, whether one can be transformed into another via a sequence of feasible solutions. Each intermediate solution of the sequence must be generated from its predecessor, subject to a predefined transition constraint. ISRP is PSPACE-complete in general. In this paper, we describe an approach to solving ISRP based on Answer Set Programming (ASP). The resulting system reads an ISRP instance and converts it into ASP facts. In turn, these facts are combined with a first-order encoding for ISRP solving, which is subsequently solved by a general-purpose ASP system, in our case clingo. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we show some experimental results on the first benchmark set of CoRe Challenge 2022.